The Dark Corners of the Night

by Meg Gardiner

  The road swept past, strip malls brightly lit, busy with late-evening diners, Christmas parties, bars and clubs full.

  “He’s in the open,” Emmerich said. “We have to get him before he slides back into the seam. We’re not letting him slip through our fingers again.”

  But Hayden had escaped from one police pursuit once already by using deadly force. There was no reason he wouldn’t expect to elude this one. And no reason he couldn’t succeed.

  But not forever.

  “He can’t keep it up,” she said.

  “With anyone else I’d say this is the end, but not the Midnight Man.” Emmerich’s voice had a strange, attenuated tone to it. His mouth clamped shut, a white line.

  “What are you thinking?” A feeling like cold water poured down her back. “GSK?”

  He drove, silent. Confirming her suspicion—he was thinking of the Golden State Killer, who eluded an FBI agent and disappeared into a dark Santa Barbara neighborhood one autumn night. At the time, the escape of a neighborhood prowler had seemed merely unfortunate. But the GSK went on to murder at least ten people, beyond several he’d already killed in Northern California. Forty years later, when his statewide reign of terror was laid bare, the prowler’s escape came to be seen as a disastrous turning point. After that night, he left no victims alive.

  Radio static again. The Sheriff’s dispatcher. “Hit and run at the intersection of Garnett and Criner. Suspect vehicle is a white pizza delivery car, heading west.”

  Emmerich jammed the pedal down. The flashing blue of their light strip reflected off roadside buildings. Caitlin brought up Criner and Garnett on GPS.

  “Half a mile ahead.”

  They blazed along. Up the road, flashing lights became visible.

  Alvarez came on. “We have the vehicle in sight and multiple units inbound. We’re going to blockade the road. Cut him off.”

  Caitlin put a hand to the dashboard. Ahead, through traffic, she caught a glimpse of white.

  “I see him.”

  The car was a block ahead, its pizza sign shining. It burned through a red light at the intersection. The Sheriff’s cruisers followed. Alvarez. The Suburban. Gaining.

  Several blocks ahead, a wall of flashing lights filled the street. The roadblock was taking shape.

  The pizza car arrowed straight toward the next intersection. Red light. Three lanes of stopped cars. He braked. Smoke rose from his tires.

  He veered toward the curb, but telephone poles and a bus stop prevented him from cutting onto the sidewalk.

  “He’s penned.”

  Caitlin’s pulse was pumping. She gripped the dash. Come on. Stop. Surrender.

  The pizza car slewed, tires squealing, and skidded sideways. Its passenger side bashed the back of a car waiting at the red light. The line of stopped cars accordioned.

  “Jesus,” Caitlin said.

  The driver’s door of the pizza car flew open and a swift figure climbed out, slid across the hood, and caromed between crushed vehicles whose drivers were still too shocked to react.

  “He’s running,” she said.

  Emmerich’s voice was an icepick. “Do not lose sight of him.”

  And she thought: Don’t carjack anybody, Hayden. Don’t put a hollow-point round through another person’s head. Run—and we’ll catch you.

  He ducked from view behind a delivery truck.

  “Hell.” She opened the door and leaped out.

  Ran between vehicles, through a jumble of cars whose horns were blaring nonstop, hoods crumpled, radiators blowing steam. She ran past the delivery truck. Where was he?

  A man shouted, “Cocksucker.” And a motorcycle engine revved.

  A bike whizzed into view and sped past her. The bike’s owner was on the pavement, climbing to his feet, pulling his helmet off. He saw her and spread his arms.

  “Asshole stole my bike.”

  The motorcycle jumped the curb into a strip mall parking lot and cut into an alley. Caitlin ran back to the Suburban.

  “He’s on two wheels.” She pointed. “Heading for the 110.”

  Lights flashing, hand on the horn, Emmerich worked his way past the crash. Sheriff’s units, bright spikes of light, tore after the bike.

  “He got on the freeway,” Alvarez said over the radio. “In pursuit.”

  A few seconds behind, Emmerich hauled the big SUV up the on-ramp. Despite the hour, the freeway was busy. Emmerich followed Alvarez’s Jeep. Radio chatter. The Sheriff’s helicopter was two minutes out.

  “He’s dodging between lanes,” Alvarez said. “Little shit knows how to drive that thing.”

  Traffic thickened. Emmerich pulled onto the left shoulder and raced along, inches from the concrete median barriers. The helicopter swept past overhead. Its spotlight painted the road.

  The freeway took a bend, and in the distance Caitlin saw the cloverleaf interchange with the 105 freeway. Four levels of twisting concrete. A stack interchange. Autopia dystopia.

  “He’ll try to lose us there,” she said.

  The interchange approached. Alvarez swung to the right-hand shoulder, stopped, jumped out of the Jeep, and ran to a guardrail. Below the rail was scrub and dense brush.

  Emmerich squealed up beside them. Caitlin put down her window.

  Alvarez pointed. “He drove the bike off the road. Down there.”

  The interchange took up acres of land. A set of cloverleaf bends half a mile in diameter, it was ten swirling lanes of concrete and ramps that curved a hundred feet overhead. Caitlin listened for the blatt of the motorcycle engine. She couldn’t hear it against all the traffic.

  Alvarez radioed their location. Called for CHP backup, LAPD, everybody. Then he said, “Screw it,” climbed over the guardrail, and pelted down the shoulder and into the night-darkened brush. Caitlin looked at Emmerich.

  “Go,” he said.

  She jumped out. The noise was overpowering, headlights whipping past, eighteen-wheelers rolling by with massive drafts of air.

  This interchange wasn’t just sweeping ramps. It sat amid dense residential neighborhoods. Major surface streets led in all directions. And, at the center of the interchange complex: escalators, elevators, and platforms for the Metro Rail Green Line. A level up from the 110 roadway was the Silver Line express bus station.

  A few people stood on the brightly lit rail platform, their attention drawn to the flashing lights of the vehicles stopped on the freeway shoulder. Caught, perplexed, by the strangeness of people on foot, standing at the roadside. Stillness amid the constant flow. Caitlin hopped the guardrail and followed Alvarez down the slope, pebbles and dust flying from beneath her boots. The helicopter’s engine droned high overhead, but the sound dimmed as she scraped through chaparral and ran past the massive concrete pylons that supported one of the cloverleaf ramps.

  Following the beam from Alvarez’s flashlight, she pushed through the brush, aware of the cold, the smell of exhaust, the weird no-man’s land. As she caught up, they heard the revving of a motorcycle engine. They exchanged a glance. Abruptly alone, together. They raised their weapons and stepped around opposite sides of a pylon.

  The motorcycle lay on its side on the dirt. Engine gunning, back wheel spinning. They swept their flashlights around the scene.

  Hayden was gone.

  Caitlin’s skin tingled. She and Alvarez turned back to back. Everything was darkness, invisibility, speed, motion.

  “We can’t lose him, not now.” She swiveled her head toward the Metro Rail station. Her heart dropped. “We need to get people watching the trains. The buses.” She was breathing hard. “Goddammit.”

  In her earpiece came the voice of Nicholas Keyes.

  “Hayden’s phone just pinged again.”

  48

  Caitlin ran back up the slope to the Suburban. Traffic arrowed past it. Emmerich stood on
the hood, binoculars to his eyes, sweeping the view, blue-tinged by the flashing light strip, talking over the radio to the Sheriff’s Department helicopter. At the Metro Rail station, a fresh crowd of people eyed them.

  In Caitlin’s earpiece, Keyes spoke rapidly. “I got that one ping. Cell tower multilateration put him somewhere to your northeast. Two minutes ago.”

  Emmerich jumped off the hood and hurried back behind the wheel. Caitlin hopped in the passenger seat and slammed the door.

  “One ping?” she said.

  “Triangulation. He’s turned off GPS. And he’s powered down the phone again. We can identify the strongest signal among the three cell towers he pinged, and narrow down his location to within fifty meters—of where he was then. But he’s been moving. Fast. All I can do is hope he turns the phone back on.”

  Emmerich said, “We need a direction to head. Northeast isn’t enough.”

  “Keyes,” Caitlin said. “Did you hear that we found the motorcycle? Dumped. He ran.”

  “Figure he turned on his phone when he abandoned the bike,” Keyes said. “Hold on. The strongest cell tower signal … it was near the eastbound 105 on-ramp. Hold on.”

  Emmerich held still, waiting.

  “Tracking Hayden’s phone via cell tower pings is tricky in real time, but …” Keyes’ voice jumped half an octave. “He pinged again. Hold on.”

  Caitlin stuck her hand out the window to signal Alvarez. Keyes came back.

  “Hayden’s vectoring downtown. He’s retreating to his buffer zone.”

  Emmerich said, “Then let’s get ahead of him.”

  Racing downtown on the freeway with Emmerich, Caitlin zoomed in on the 3-D map of the Midnight Man’s hunting grounds. It throbbed with false color. Overlaid on the teeming landscape of Los Angeles County, it resembled a psychedelic representation of speakers booming out spikes of sound. Yellow, orange, red, falling to drips of purple. And, in the center, the flat blue-green circle of the downtown buffer zone.

  It was a bull’s-eye over downtown Los Angeles, two miles in diameter.

  They were diving into the bright, shadowed, thumping core of the city. The most densely populated urban metro in the country. The buffer zone included thousands of addresses. Hundreds of streets and freeways. Skyscrapers, stadiums, parks, homeless camps.

  And the night was full of people. Though the clock hovered around midnight, LA was out in multitudes. Christmas shopping was at its peak. The Lakers game at Staples Center had just finished. So had a benefit concert at the Music Center.

  Alvarez was ahead of them on the freeway. Keyes was driving in from West LA. Emmerich had sent Rainey to join the FBI air unit.

  The LAPD was out in force, but many of their officers were detailed to traffic and event security.

  Emmerich rolled past the electric purple-blue glow of Staples Center, and the shimmering Ritz-Carlton, and pulled off the freeway.

  “If he’s on foot, or was delayed stealing another vehicle, we’re in good shape,” he said.

  He didn’t mention the alternative. If Hayden was on an express bus, a Metro Rail train, or had lucked into finding a fast car unlocked on somebody’s driveway, they were in a race.

  And Hayden knew where he was going. Could take a straight shot, a ballistic voyage, directly there. His pursuers were driving semi-blind, hoping to pick up his scent. The police could stop buses, could monitor train stops, could set up more roadblocks, but not everywhere, and not soon enough.

  And somewhere, maybe in the heart of the city, was Hannah Guillory. Maybe. And maybe her heart was still beating.

  Caitlin’s throat constricted. She forced a breath. Emmerich crossed an intersection, office buildings rising on either side, restaurants spilling the last of their diners. Outside a hotel, limos waited to shepherd partygoers home from some swanky bash.

  Caitlin tracked their path on the tablet. “We just crossed into the buffer zone.”

  The stars were gone, overwhelmed by the artificial lightning of the electric grid. Emmerich turned off the Suburban’s light strip and slowed to a crawl. Caitlin scanned the sidewalks. On a cross street, an LAPD unit cruised past. Downtown, the FBI and cops provided dozens of eyes, but they couldn’t see well enough in the crowded night.

  They needed more. They needed a signal from beyond visual range, deeper in the electromagnetic spectrum.

  Emmerich cued his radio. “Keyes. Where are you? What do you have?”

  Static came back. Nothing.

  “Keyes,” Emmerich repeated.

  “Here,” Keyes said breathlessly, distantly. “Had to stop. I’m on Wilshire, heading your way. Pulled over because I can’t type on the laptop and drive at the same time.”

  Emmerich stopped at a light near Figueroa and Seventh Street. There was a shopping center ahead, and a Metrolink station catty-corner to them. A park nearby. People flowing. Caitlin tried to mentally set her brain to search for lanky men with a light, carefree saunter to their stride. Probably with a note of fatigue now. Maybe even jumpy, glancing around over their shoulder. For her and Emmerich, perching here and watching was as good as prowling. Unless they could get definite information to direct them.

  Over the radio, she heard Keyes breathing. Typing. Then, frantic. “I found his phone.”

  She sat up straight.

  “Vector,” Emmerich said. “We’re at Seventh and Figueroa.”

  “East,” Keyes said.

  Emmerich pulled around the corner. Caitlin suppressed the thought that Hayden might deliberately leave his phone on a train or bus.

  “The pings are intermittent,” Keyes said. “But five minutes ago, he turned the phone on long enough to capture its progress from one cell site to the next. It’s east of City Hall. Hold on,” he said again, like a priest intoning amen. “Overlaying a map of active cell sites—there’s a zone where it’s like a black hole.”

  Emmerich headed east, easing through intersections.

  “There’s a major construction zone southeast of City Hall. A quarter mile from LAPD headquarters. Skid Row adjacent,” Keyes said. “Several cell sites in the zone have temporarily been taken out of service.”

  Between buildings they caught sight of City Hall, white and towering. The bustle and flow of shopping petered out. Restaurants were farther between. Bars dingier.

  Emmerich swung around a corner into a warehouse district. Some buildings had been converted to loft apartments. Others were abandoned. He radioed their location.

  Keyes came back on. “The center point of the buffer zone is two blocks ahead.”

  Emmerich braked to a stop. Dead ahead was a fenced-off four-square-block redevelopment project. Old office buildings and hotels slated for demolition were cordoned behind screened construction fencing. It comprised a city neighborhood. It was bigger than entire downtowns in some cities. It was darkened and desolate.

  “I think we found it,” Caitlin said.

  She gave Keyes the coordinates.

  “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the core of the buffer zone. His phone pinged a cell site just outside it.”

  It was dark. No street lights. No lights in the empty buildings beyond the fencing.

  Ground Zero.

  “If the phone’s there, we can assume Hayden is too,” Emmerich said.

  Caitlin’s throat squeezed tighter. Hannah could also be there. With Hayden closing in on her.

  “We have to go in,” she said.

  Emmerich paused, eyeing the emptiness across the street. Radioed. “Keyes. Alert the task force commanders. Now.”

  Emmerich’s face was sere. He seemed to have boiled off any extraneous thoughtfulness, emotion, anything except cold focus.

  “Right now, we have thin backup,” he said. “The perimeter of this zone is massive. The LAPD can be marshaled in force but can’t quickly secure it.”

 
Caitlin brought up a detailed city map. “These blocks were cordoned off to keep out scavengers, looters, and squatters during demolition. But this construction fence clearly isn’t impenetrable.”

  “Hardly. Hayden has obviously found access.”

  She thought about the zone. Scanned the fencing. There were hoardings advertising the demolition company. But also ads for the planned redevelopment. Sleek office towers, more loft apartments, gallery spaces. Dense development, much of it using the existing buildings’ original brickwork.

  “They’re going to use the same footprint as what’s there now,” she said. “That means these cordoned-off blocks have access to manholes and utility tunnels.”

  “Underground escape routes,” Emmerich said.

  There were a few security lights on power poles inside the perimeter.

  “I’m calling Detective Solis,” Emmerich said. “He’s the one who needs to liaise with the city, the demolition company, utilities, find out what’s online, what’s been turned off.”

  “If some cell sites in there are still active, it means they’re connected to the electric grid. Buildings where construction’s in progress will have power. Shutting everything down will take hours.”

  He looked at her. He didn’t want to go in without a solid plan, a much more solid perimeter, and overwhelming tactical backup. She returned the look.

  “We don’t have hours,” she said.

  He pulled out his phone as he climbed from the Suburban.

  Ten minutes after Emmerich made his phone call, Solis and Weisbach arrived. Alvarez and Durand. Half a dozen uniformed LAPD officers. Other units were patrolling the exterior of the cordon, and several black-and-whites were parked at the corners, spotlights on, trying to cover the fencing. The roads inside the demolition zone were blocked off by concrete barriers. Driving into the neighborhood would be impossible.

  A map was spread on the hood of the Suburban. Emmerich, Caitlin, the task force detectives, and the uniformed officers planned to enter on foot and begin a grid search. Solis directed them to cover discrete sectors in pairs. They checked their earpieces.

  “Silent entry,” Solis said.